My Prison Cell: A War Against the Roaches

If it looked like a place where a roach could enter or flee, it was covered up. This was the beginning of the end for the roaches in cell 956.

ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR TAYLOR

I_n February, Jennifer Lackey, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, where I teach journalism, invited me to speak to a class she teaches at the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison an hour outside of Chicago. Her students, fifteen men, are all serving long sentences, mostly for violent crimes. Some will be at Stateville until they die. I talked with the students about storytelling, and had them complete an exercise in which they described their cells._

I was so taken by what they wrote that I suggested that they develop these stories about the space, which, for some, had been home for twenty years. Over the past ten months, I have worked with them from draft to draft to draft. This process was not without obstacles. Sometimes, Jennifer couldn’t return my marked-up drafts because the prison was on lockdown. One student missed class for a month because, after surgery, he had to wear a knee brace, which the prison considered a potential weapon. Another student was transferred to a different prison. (I continued working with him by mail and phone.) One despaired at my comments and edits, writing to me that “this must be my last draft because clearly I’m incapable of doing it correctly.” But with encouragement and gentle nudging they kept going. Below is one of five of these stories that will appear on the site this week.

—Alex Kotlowitz

I knew something was up when I noticed two inmates standing in front of my cell with all of their property. The officer called: “You and your cellie pack your property—you’re moving to cell 956.”

“Man, I hate moving,” I recall thinking to myself. Right when I have one cell the way I want it, I have to break in another.

While packing my property, I got an early heads-up on what I was in for. “Smiley, Smiley,” my neighbor called. “Look at his bag.” He was pointing to the laundry bag of one of the men waiting to move in to my cell. As I turned, I saw roaches oozing out of the bag. It was the middle of the day, and sunlight broke through the layers of dirt built up on the windows of the gallery. The roaches seemed accustomed to hanging out in the light.

The other man waiting to move in was an older man named Pat. Pat was a white man in his late forties or early fifties, with a face full of stubble. I knew him casually from our time on the gallery. When he spoke, he slurred his words, as if he were perpetually drunk.

“Pat,” I asked, “are the roaches real bad in your cell?”

“My cellie kept them as pets,” he responded. This was Pat’s way of telling me that his cellie left food open around the cell, which gave the roaches no incentive to leave.

The officer overseeing the move looked at the oozing bag with disgust. I made one last plea. “Look, officer, I don’t have any roaches in this cell. If you put them in here, you’ll just be infesting two cells.” I knew it was a long shot, but it was worth a try. The officer shrugged, as if to let me know that it was out of his hands. So I began moving my property down the gallery.

Upon reaching my new cell, I immediately spotted the problem. There was a two-inch gap between the light fixture and the wall. Pat had already warned me that this was where many of the roaches entered and exited.

I went to inspect the cell. I walked in and turned on the lights. Two dozen roaches huddled in the middle of the floor between the sink-toilet combo and the bunkbeds. It was as if they were having a town-hall meeting. It unnerved me at first, because usually with light roaches scatter. But the roaches stood their ground.

It didn’t take long for me to start stomping on them like I was Bigfoot, so they would understand that they weren’t welcome in the cell any longer. After killing the town hall of roaches, I turned the light off. Two minutes later, I turned the lights back on and there were at least ten more in the same spot. It was then that I knew I was in for a fight.

Let me take a moment to shed some light, so to speak, on this war I was about to undertake. To do so, we have to go back twenty-three years, to 1993, and Menard Correctional Center, where I met a man I’ll call Fester.

Back then, the whole prison was pretty much infested with roaches, so much so that their presence had to be tolerated as normal, though measures were taken by those who valued cleanliness to keep them down to a minimum. Fester, however, was different. Fester was six feet tall and had to weigh close to four hundred pounds. Fester lived off a steady diet of candy bars, junk food, and soda pop. He lived in squalor and had poor hygiene and bad health. He had diabetes and was insulin-dependent, and he was an alcoholic who guzzled all the hooch he could get his hands on. Fester’s social life in prison revolved around one activity that was very popular back then: gambling.

One day, when Fester came to the yard looking for a poker game, he approached the table where I was playing chess to see if he could convince me and the guys to change our focus. He smelled of urine and sour milk, but what blew my mind was that, in his hair and beard, roaches crawled around. I pointed it out to him, thinking maybe he wasn’t aware of them. “Hey, Fester, man, get those roaches out of your hair,” I hollered. And he responded, “Oh, they ain’t hurtin’ nothing, we got an understanding and we cool.”

I was about twenty-one at the time, still early in my bit. Fester was in his forties and had been locked up for more than twenty years. In that moment, I realized that Fester had totally given up on himself. It was also in that moment that I went to war with everything that Fester represented. The loss of vigilance against the elements of prison that subtly ask you to surrender your dignity. So, when I entered that cell, I said to myself, “I’m not gonna let this beat me.”

We’re not allowed any kind of poison, for the obvious reasons, so I had to think about how best to enter this fight. I had an idea. I asked a sympathetic officer if he could get some plastic garbage bags and some clear tape. This was one of the rare times where both cellies swapped cells. After moving into the cell, my old cellie and I placed our books, folders, legal work, clothes, and food in these bags. We tied them up tight so nothing could get in. The only thing that didn’t go into the bag were our TVs, our radios, and our fans.

My plan was simple. I was going to remove every possible refuge for the roaches. Wrapping up all of our property was only the first step. After that, I taped every crack and crevice in the cell. If it looked like a place where a roach could enter or flee, it was covered up. This was the beginning of the end for the roaches in cell 956.

When I looked under the bed, I found a nesting spot in one of the rusting metal poles that supported our bunkbeds. I got on my stomach, crawled under the bunk, and taped the pole. I also set up the prison version of a Roach Motel. Our version was an open aluminum potato-chip bag, stood up against the wall. I put a banana peel in the bag to get the roaches’ attention. I let it sit overnight. And in the morning, when I opened the bag, at least ten roaches were trapped, unable to crawl their way out because of the grease from the potato chips. I poured the contents of the bag into the toilet, then repeated the process.

They kept coming. Bailey, my cellie, preferred that I be the one smashing the roaches. He didn’t like that crunch sound the roaches made when you smashed them. He said it made his skin crawl.

One day, while watching TV, I came across what I would call a commando roach. It was no bigger than the others, but its survival instincts were off the charts.

I caught him out of the corner of my eye. When I raised my hand, it dove into a loose sheet on my bed. I quickly grabbed my sheet and flicked it, repulsed that the roach was in my sheet. No roach. As I sat on the bunk, flustered, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked at the back wall and saw it racing toward the light fixture. I rose, and, before I could raise my hand, he dove again, this time landing in the sink and scurrying down the drain.

As luck would have it, commando roach led me to the third nesting spot. When I looked under the sink, I spotted five roaches running around—a couple were babies. I assumed there must be a hole there, so I ran seven strands of tape from one end of the sink-toilet combo to the other. Every day I checked under the sink. After a week I was convinced they were gone.

It was a hard-fought two-month war. There were many nights when I didn’t get much sleep, and in the immediate aftermath I was exhausted. I went from smashing twenty roaches a day to ten; from ten roaches to five. Where I once refused to leave an open bag of chips in the cell, I now began cooking pizzas (saltine crackers with summer sausage, mozzarella cheese, ketchup, and thousand island dressing), burritos, and bowl meals with ramen noodles, summer sausage, cheese, beans, and rice, with Doritos.

Over the years, times have changed. I’m not in the roach-infested cell, and Bailey is not my cellie anymore. After the war in H-cell 956, Bailey gave me the nickname the Roach Inspector. He used it mockingly, but I took pride in that name. Bailey never knew about Fester, or maybe he would’ve understood why I waged the war that I did.